Alchemistry

Alchemistry is a crafting puzzle played at an apothecary. Completing a round of alchemistry finishes one hour of labor on a product currently in the apothecary queue. Alchemistry loosely borrows its mechanics from Popcap's Rocket Mania.

Alchemistry can be played with the mouse or arrow keys; the individual controls can be modified using the options screen. Use the mouse (or arrow keys) to select the piece you wish to rotate: a left mouse click (or S key) rotates the piece counterclockwise, while a right mouse click (or D key) rotates the piece clockwise. You can also use a mouse wheel if equipped to rotate either way. Hitting the "FILL" button (or the spacebar) causes all the paths you have connected to be filled. This option does not appear until at least one path goes to a bottle.

The object of each turn is to route color paths down to the bottles. You must match the color path to the bottommost color in a bottle; mismatching the color path to the wrong color will cause the bottle to break. A game is finished when all the bottle slots at the bottom of the screen (between "FILL" and the mouse image) have been filled.

Next to the mouse you can find a move counter, which starts at 75 and counts down to zero. This counter decrements each time you turn a different piece (e.g. rotating piece A twice counts as one move; rotating piece A once and piece B once counts as two moves; rotating piece A once, piece B twice, and piece A once again counts as three moves). When the counter turns to 10, the most valuable bottle (or two) will start vibrating. If the counter is at 0 and you make a new move, the vibrating bottles will break. The counter has no effect on scoring; however, breaking bottles incurs a scoring penalty.

The Alchemistry puzzle is unusual in that it is untimed—unlike the other crafting puzzles, there is no need to rush.

After a few games, you will be required to fill both primary and secondary colors. The secondary colors can be created as follows:

Mixing yellow and blue produces green.

Mixing blue and red produces purple.

Mixing red and yellow produces orange.

Mixing all three colors produces brown, which will never be needed.

Routing a color to a wrong bottle breaks the bottle, as shown in the right side of the above image. Broken bottles do not move from the conveyor belt, thus clogging a spot for the remainder of the game.

If you find a bottle with more than one color, the bottom-most color is always filled first. After a particularly good fill, you might notice bottles gleaming (you can check by clicking on any of the bottles on the conveyor bottle). These bottles hold valuable clears which you should aim to fill first. Bottles, once filled, will sometimes show one, two, or three stars in their slot at the bottom of the screen. The most valuable bottles have three stars.

Three special pieces will occasionally pop up on your board. They are more likely to appear after a high-scoring fill.

The gold coin or "bonus piece" gives a slight scoring bonus when a color is routed through it. The arrow icon, called the "multifill piece", is rare, but if routed through it fills all the instances of a color in a bottle. The "Quicksilver" piece (with an image of a "Q") can be routed through to create a new grey-colored bulb on the next turn. This color can be used as any of the six colors, thus making it extremely valuable.

Secondary colors are more valuable than primaries. The secondary formed from the two outer colors is slightly more valuable than the others.

Filling more than one bottle of the same color at a time grants an increasing bonus the more you can manage.

Filling more than one bottle of different colors grants an increasing multiplier the more you can manage.

All bonuses are applied to all bottles affected.

Bottles with multiple colors required are scored by the average of each, with a slight bonus for each. (An example with completely made-up numbers: a red, red, green bottle on which you got 6, 8, 14, your score would be the average of 6, 8+1 and 14+1, or 10)

High-scoring on the last bottles is not at all wasted. If you fill more bottles than needed on your last turn, the game will choose your highest-scoring bottles to be filled first.